Shopping at Fry's

Michael A kind of love-hate relationship has developed between me and the computer superstore "Fry's Electronics." This is a chain of stores that offer computer products on sales floors the size of football fields and regularly place six-page color ads in the "San Jose Mercury," the newspaper in Silicon Valley. On one hand, their prices are quite low, but on the other hand, everyone knows that they operate with dubious business practices, such as repackaging returned goods in the original plastic wrap and selling them as new, among other tricks.

The pricing is also dubious, and the price tags on the shelves often show a much lower price than what the cashier then rings up. One day I found myself at the checkout, suddenly expected to pay $30 more for a $200 hard drive. Naturally, I kicked up a fuss, as you might expect. Eventually, the manager came over and said that if I insisted, an employee would accompany me to the shelf to show me the price tag there--and I said that's exactly what I wanted. A Fry's employee then accompanied me back through the entire store to the shelf where I had found the hard drive, showed me the price tag, and lo and behold, beneath the large, prominently displayed lower price was a bunch of fine print. After stepping up to within 50 cm of the sign, I could read that the lower price was after a mail-in rebate, meaning you had to pay more at the register and then send a coupon to the company, which would then mail you a $30 check. I was, of course, quite embarrassed, so I apologized profusely, went back to the register with the guy, and bought the item at the higher price.

At that time, we didn't have a car yet, so I had ridden my bike and taken the train to Fry's in Palo Alto after work. When I got home, I opened the package and was horrified to find that there was no coupon for the mail-in rebate. Oh, the misery! I didn't go to Fry's for quite a while after that and had almost forgotten about the incident when it happened that, while visiting our friends Syllus and Richard in Portland, I stopped by a Fry's branch. I saw there that the mail-in coupons were handed out to buyers by the employees. I waited until a salesperson left their post and grabbed a coupon. Unfortunately, a few months had passed since my purchase, and the new coupon was only valid for purchases in the current month. You had to send in a copy of the store receipt with the coupon, so I made a deliberately poor copy where the date couldn't be clearly seen, sent in the stuff--and, behold: six weeks later, the check arrived. My triumphant roar could be heard all the way to Palo Alto.